VIEW FROM THE SEVENTH FLOOR

Walt Rostow, head of our government's Policy Planning Council, presumably knows as much as anyone about the relationship of American diplomacy to our military policies. His first several chapters are about global strategy, the history of NATO, the role of Germany, and the general world picture in terms of the deterrence of international aggression. His discussion of guerrilla warfare is quite different in theme from most recent studies, such as Thayer's; it revolves around the ideology, rather than the tactics, of Communist-inspired paramilitary operations. Rostow does not really warm up until he reaches the chapters on foreign aid and the economic development of ""have-not nations."" Based on American experience, he offers a number of specific suggestions for growth stimulation, particularly with respect to creating national markets in areas where goods are not yet available to most of the population, and on the whole his proposals sound reasonable and even practical. Tucked in among this material are to be found a few well-worded statements encapsulating the historical fallacies of Marxism, for anyone seeking solid quotable matter on that subject. The comments on capitalism and democracy with which those paragraphs are paired are, unfortunately, much more ambiguous. His closing chapters on the cold war and the possibilities of winning it are neither stirring nor especially informative.